Jordan Pruitt has announced she is preparing to record a new version of “Outside Looking In,” her debut single, to mark the song’s 20th anniversary later this year. Pruitt shared the news in a video posted to her TikTok account.
The original landed in June 2006 on Hollywood Records, cut to promote the Disney Channel Original Movie “Read It and Weep” starring Kay Panabaker. Pruitt was 15. She wrote the song with producer Keith Thomas and Robin Scoffield, and it ran a tight 2 minutes and 54 seconds, the kind of length pop radio barely makes anymore.
The single took its time finding a chart home, though. “Outside Looking In” debuted at No. 77 on the Billboard Hot 100 in mid-February 2007, the highest debut of that week, and that position held as its peak. The track also reached No. 62 on Billboard’s Pop 100 and anchored her debut album “No Ordinary Girl,” which arrived February 6, 2007, and opened at No. 64 on the Billboard 200 with 14,000 copies sold in its first week. Pruitt even cut a Spanish-language version, “Siempre desde afuera,” in early 2007.
Her run after that covered a lot of ground, more or less the full arc of a mid-2000s Hollywood Records act. She opened for the Cheetah Girls, the Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato, released a second album called “Permission to Fly” in 2008, and competed on Season 3 of “The Voice” in 2012 as a member of Christina Aguilera’s team. In December 2017 she announced her retirement from music and shifted to running The Aero Bar in Nashville with her husband, Brian Fuente.
That retirement appears to be over. Her Spotify artist page now lists a new single, “Hold the Current,” released this year, her first new release since a 2016 Christmas single.
The anniversary math works in her favor too. “Read It and Weep” premiered on Disney Channel on July 21, 2006, which puts the movie’s own 20th anniversary just weeks away, and the original recording of “Outside Looking In” still counts more than 7.8 million streams on Spotify. A release date for the new version has not been announced.
